Art Exhibitions

September 30, 2014

Learn from the masters. That's what artists do. Young or old, seasoned creators or complete beginners, people look to past masterpieces to understand and often replicate the style of great works of art. That's the scenario that played out at the Georgia Museum of Artas they wrapped up their showing of Women, Art, and Social Change: The Newcomb Pottery Enterprise. More than 180 works--ranging from pottery to jewelry to textiles and made by a new class of emerging female artisans in the post-Civil War South--are included in the Smithsonian's traveling exhibition. One of those works became the inspiration for a student at the University of Georgia. Here's Patrick's story . . .

"I love ceramics. This is my third ceramics course, and I plan on pursuing a minor in Studio Art. I really liked all of the work in the Newcomb Pottery show, but I became fascinated with a tall vase adorned with daffodils. The shape of the vessel accentuated the daffodil blooms, and the flowers had great movement. I also enjoyed the simple but vibrant colors used to decorate the vase: blues, greens, whites, and yellows.

In my efforts to make my own version of the tall vase, I threw its body on the wheel in two parts. Then, I smoothed the surface and worked on creating the right shape. After waiting for the vase to become leather hard, I began to carve the designs into the surface. I made a stencil of each and transferred the outline of each to the vase. I imagined that the Newcomb artists would have used a similar technique to achieve the expert spacing and symmetry in their artwork. After the vase was bisque fired, I applied underglaze to the surface. This is the way the original piece's surface was treated as well. I tried to use similar tones that were appropriate with the other artwork in the show. I then sprayed the surface with a clear glaze that made the surface shiny."

The original vase that inspired Patrick (seen at bottom right) was painted by Harriet Coulter Joor (1875-1965), who received a Bachelor's of Science degree from Newcomb College (now Newcomb College Institute of Tulane Unversity in New Orleans). She was a pottery designer from 1901-04 and from 1905-06.

July 02, 2014

In celebration of our upcoming traveling exhibition What's Up, Doc? The Animation Art of Chuck Jones, we're exploring what makes Jones' cartoons so engaging and so darn funny. Aside from the amazing animation, precision timing, and incredible musical scores, the unresolved conflicts between eternally dueling antagonists are at the core of the comic experience, right? In other words, Bugs Bunny is always outwitting his opponents, which include Elmer Fudd, Daffy Duck, and Yosemite Sam. And the hungry cat Sylvester is never able to catch the elusive Tweety Bird. Then, there's Road Runner and Wile E. Coyote (poor fellow).

In 1949, Chuck Jones created the characters Wile E. Coyote and the Road Runner for the cartoon Fast and Furry-ous. Jones was inspired by author Mark Twain’s description of the coyote as "a long, slim, sick and sorry-looking skeleton" that is "a living, breathing allegory of Want. He is always hungry." Jones directed or co-directed more than 25 Coyote and Road Runner cartoons, which represent the purest expression of his approach to screen comedy.

June 20, 2014

He looks spry enough, but your old friend Bugs Bunny is over the hill. The beloved cartoon rabbit, made famous by artist and animator Chuck Jones, is in his seventies! We set out to discover what this iconic character's "bunnyhood" was like:

1938: Warner Bros. director Ben “Bugs” Hardaway created a rabbit character for the film Porky’s Hare Hunt.

1939: For Bugs’s next appearance, in Hare-um Scare-um, character designer Charles Thorson made a model sheet and referred to the rabbit as “Bug’s Bunny.” This bunny was screwball, antic, and cute. Two of Chuck Jones’s early cartoons, Prest-O Change-O and Elmer’s Candid Camera, featured this proto-Bugs.

1943: Bugs Bunny’s enduring physical characteristics were established in a model sheet drawn by Robert McKimson.

In later films such as Rabbit of Seville, Bully for Bugs, and Rabbit Fire, Chuck Jones established Bugs Bunny as an imperturbable comic hero. Jones’s Bugs has a subtle but distinctive arrogance in the way he moves, and is always smarter than his adversary. He gives the impression that if everyone would just leave him alone, he would happily spend his time eating carrots and studying philosophy. To explain the difference between the earlier, more antic versions of Bugs Bunny and his own, Jones noted, “The early Bugs is truly crazy. My Bugs pretends to be crazy, which is, I believe, arguably far funnier.”

June 20, 2012

Our traveling exhibition William H. Johnson: An American Modern is currently on display at Morgan State University’s James E. Lewis Museum, in Baltimore, Maryland, through June 31st. While you might be familiar with the artist William H. Johnson, you may not know the story behind how Johnson’s artwork came into the Smithsonian's collection. The Institution was among three pivotal and inextricably linked players in the history of Johnson’s artwork, the others being Dr. James E. Lewis and the Harmon Foundation.

A bit of background: William H. Johnson was born in Florence, South Carolina, in 1901, and is considered an important figure in modern American art. He studied at the National Academy of Design in New York, producing thousands of works that covered several different artistic genres--mainly post impressionism, fauvism, and expressionism.

During the 1920s and '30s, he moved between both America and Europe (France, Denmark, and Norway as well as North Africa), before eventually settling in New York City in 1938. Johnson stopped painting in the late 1940s, after a slow mental decline left him in institutionalized care.

With no living family and no storage space to house his paintings, Johnson's work was nearly destroyed. In 1956, however, the Harmon Foundation, a non-profit organization that helped foster awareness of African American art, stepped in and rescued the works. The foundation took ownership of Johnson's books and paintings--some 1,154 of them to be exact. When the foundation itself finally had to shut its doors in 1967, the Johnson works went to the Smithsonian’s National Collections of Fine Arts (now the Smithsonian American Art Museum).

The terms of the agreement stipulated that the Smithsonian donate some artwork to black colleges and universities, including Baltimore’s Morgan State University. The founding chair of Morgan’s art department, Dr. James E. Lewis, was the first to carefully select works for his museum’s permanent collection. Lewis chose 20 works that embodied the critical stages of Johnson’s career, including his post-impressionist and expressionist works of the 1920s and his vernacular paintings from the end of his career in the 1940s. Johnson’s style was somewhat similar to Van Gogh and Cezanne's, and yet there was an acknowledgement that Johnson's works were distinctive, unforgettable visions from an modern American artist.

Now SITES is the first organization to travel all 20 of Johnson’s seminal works from Morgan State‘s collection. The Smithsonian has truly come full circle with William H. Johnson. Not only has it been able to carry out the Harmon Foundation’s wishes by dispensing Johnson’s work to Morgan State University, but we've also had the privilege of being able to share these works with people across the country.

William H. Johnson: An American Modern was developed by Morgan State University and SITES, with support from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Henry Luce Foundation, and the Morgan State University Foundation, Inc. Additional support for this exhibition was provided by Ford Motor Company Fund.

January 26, 2012

Our Elvis at 21: Photographs by Alfred Wertheimerexhibition has been swinging since Elvis' 75th birthday back in 2010. Enthusiasm for this exhibition, comprised of 56 black-and-white images taken by the acclaimed photographer Alfred Wertheimer, has never wanned. In fact, the buzz about Elvis has become something of a frenzy at the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts in Richmond.

A few weeks after throwing an incredible Elvis birthday gig attended by nearly 2,000 people, the museum hosted a screening of "Elvis '56," a 1987 documentary film narrated by Levon Helm, the Arkansas-born drummer-singer for "The Band." It was the first time I had seen the movie in full, but within the first four minutes, I was struck by two things: One was that Helm was the perfect interpreter of Elvis' story. With iconic hits like "The Night They Drove Old Dixie Down," and "The Weight," he clearly understood the soul of Southern music and the culture that gave birth to it.

The other thing was that the viewers weren't just watching the clips, they were responding to the film. When Elvis sang, they came to life. He danced, and they were exuberant. Elvis was their hero. They cheered when the narrator recited John Lennon's words "Before Elvis, there was nothing." And when the girls in the original 1956 footage screamed, there were collective murmurs of understanding as if the crowd too remembered getting all worked up. When Elvis swung his hips aggressively, provocatively, in one performance, they felt the power of that pelvis, even now. In this YouTube-age of anything goes, that was as surprise.

With every seat in the auditorium occupied by a fan, it almost felt like we were back at the Mosque Theater (Richmond, VA) on June 30, 1956. Here, the most memorable images in the exhibition were shot; here, the girls hung on window ledges trying to catch Elvis' eye during rehearsal, and here, Elvis stole away for a steamy, toungue-touching kiss in a back stairwell.

Some 56 years later, Alfred Wertheimer recalled that the fans screamed, "We want Elvis! We want Elvis!" I could hear echoes of those words again in the auditorium. It was truly the closest many of us would get to seeing Elvis live!

Special thanks to the Virginia Museum of Fine Arts for their fantastic programming in conjunction with "Elvis at 21, Photographs by Alfred Wertheimer." For more on the exhibition and discussions with other fans, visit the show on Facebook, Twitter, and YouTube.

August 24, 2011

SITES' upcoming fine art exhibition, William H. Johnson: An American Modern, features a jewel-like collection of 20 works encapsulating the artist's stylistic evolution and subjective experience of the world. Currently owned by Morgan State University in Baltimore, Maryland, the story of how these paintings found their way to Morgan, and how they now come to travel with the Smithsonian, is dramatic.

William H. Johnson (1901-1970)--a wildly prolific artist who was lauded as a technical master and experimental genius at the height of his career--suddenly and permanently stopped painting at the age of 46 due to health concerns that persisted for the remainder of his life. By this point, Johnson was a childless widower, and his art was moved to a rented storage space in lower Manhattan for safekeeping.

In 1956, the William Harmon Foundation, an early Johnson patron, took ownership of the artist's collection of art, books, and personal effects, and agreed to use them to promote Johnson's reputation and to advance the achievements of other black American artists. The Foundation recognized the unique value in Johnson's work and put forth a great effort to conserve and exhibit the art they acquired.

Three years before Johnson's death in 1970, the Harmon Foundation closed its doors. Fortunately, its founders took bold steps to ensure that Johnson's work would continue to be seen and celebrated. The Foundation's collection of 1,154 paintings by Johnson was given to what is now the Smithsonian American Art Museum.

The Harmon Foundation charged the Smithsonian with the task of reaching out "to the masses of our people" and "rais[ing] their sights and . . . feeling for art at the core of life," and specifically requested that selected Johnson works be distributed to several black colleges and universities, including Morgan State. The young and enthusiastic leaders of the art departments at these schools were committed, as the Harmon Foundation had been, to raising the profile of African American artists.

Morgan's art department chair, James E. Lewis, was first on the scene and carefully selected works from each stage of Johnson's career. The masterful paintings Mr. Lewis chose have remained at the university for the past 35 year, yet the collection has never been displayed in its entirety. Gabriel Tenabe, Mr. Lewis's successor as director of the Museum of Art at Morgan State University, knew of his institution's history with the Smithsonian and began exploring the possibility of collaborating on a traveling exhibition more than a decade ago. Mr. Tenabe called in Marquette Folley, a project director at SITES, to brainstorm for ideas, and Morgan's collection of Johnson paintings soon emerged as a strong prospect.

The resulting William H. Johnson exhibition and accompanying book of the same title are a true testament to the good that can come when cultural institutions stay true to their mission. The collaboration between SITES, Morgan State, and a small community of Johnson scholars has succeeded not only in bringing Johnson to the attention of museums and museum patrons around the country, but also in providing a fresh analysis of his work and his significance as a often overlooked genius of American modern art.

That means 40% of our audience is over 45 (not exactly senior citizens but pretty close in the technology world). Why is this the case? Are older users more inclined to follow cultural organizations? Do they have more time to devote to such activities? Or, is it more about the the topic of conservation?

We'll argue that it may be all of these, but my inclination is to suggest that the latter is the biggest contributing factor. This particular Facebook page is all about Elvis, a complement to the traveling exhibition Elvis at 21, Photographs by Alfred Wertheimer, and everyday is something new about the rock-n-roll legend--trivia, curatorial insight, photographic history, videos, etc.

Not that Elvis doesn't have a younger following. Indeed, some of the most rabid fans are under 25, but those who are most engaged on our Facebook page fall into the more mature crowd; they are the folks who listened to Elvis as a kid or sat in the front row at one of his concerts. They are the ones who know Elvis inside and out; in fact, these fans have taught us a thing or two on more than one occasion.

Switching fields a bit, we also have a Twitter account for the exhibition @elvisat21, but this platform doesn't seem to attract the same number of older followers. When we've mentioned the Twitter page to our Facebook fans, the usual response is "Oh, I'm not on Twitter," or "I don't really know how to do Twitter." Even when we baited the platform with free Elvis giveaways or trivia contests, the leap never occurred. Most of our mature Facebook users were happy to stay put, even if it meant missing out on some rare exhibition-related freebies.

The exhibition continues its national tour through 2013, and the Facebook/Twitter accounts will be there along the way, so the final verdict is still out, but it's certainly interesting to see how the social media world is embracing (or not) a new audience.

May 24, 2010

Another Monday. Time to reflect on the excitement of the past weekend. With two children and a background in everything museum related, I usually find some time to incorporate a museum visit into our weekend plans. I'm lucky; my children are still at an age where anything that I'm interested in is also interesting to them--as long as I give it the proper level of preschool enthusiasm.

Up to this point, we've been advocates of science and natural history museums. Generally, these institutions are kid friendly and are well-equipped to accommodate families; after all, what six year old isn't fascinated by dinosaurs, pandas, butterflies, or volcanoes? It's also much easier for a parent to engage a child when the subject matter is familiar: nature is all around us, and most of us can riff on topics like weather, habitats, and the stars even without having a formal education in biology or astronomy: it just part of our collective understanding.

Art, however, is something entirely different. What does a parent with no training in art history say about a Matisse? "Oh, look at the pretty colors?" Well, yes. I found in visiting art museums with children, that you need to talk to them on their level. What would a child see in such a work? Color, shapes, lines, people, places, animals? Engage them in a way they understand (depending on the age of the child).

The last time we visited a major art museum, we kept the visit short--under an hour--and did our best to pick out paintings that had animals in them. It was a scavenger hunt; we were on the prowl for lions (a no brainer in the Rubens gallery), cats (perfect for Baroque Dutch art), and dogs (apparently ubiquitous in 18th-century landscapes and equestrian images). I stopped myself from postulating on theory and symbolism and instead stuck to the basics. This way we were just discovering things together rather than setting up a standard teacher-student paradigm. (Of course, I couldn't resist a couple of "Did you knows . . .")

Just as important was to have fun looking in these beautiful galleries; museum manners must always be followed, but excitement and enthusiasm shouldn't stifled, even within hallowed museum walls.

Art museums can indeed be just as engaging as natural history and science centers, but if you're not feeling confident about your own ability to talk about art with children, most museums have family guides or special kids tours that really do a good job of dissecting works of art.

As the dynamics of American families change so too do the museums that serve them. And at SITES, we're keeping pace with those changes, creating exhibition-related materials that can be used by parents, teachers, and care givers alike. Check out a complete list of our curriculum/parent materials, and don't forget to take advantage of all the family-friendly resources available through the Smithsonian Center of Education and Museum Studies.

Playing off the exhibition’s spotlight on the compelling portraits seen in the iconic magazine, Mike and his staff launched their own photo contest, called “People in Focus.”They displayed e-mailed photo submissions as a rotating slide show on a flat screen TV in the gallery, and offered up a great prize: the winners in three categories (one subject, two subjects, three or more subjects) would have their photos professionally printed and framed… and hung in the museum!

Congrats to Mike and his colleagues on a great idea.Here are the winners!

March 02, 2010

On Friday, February 16, America lost an artist who during his successful career captured with passion and integrity the wonder and excitement of space exploration. Robert McCall died at the age of 90 in Scottsdale, Arizona. During his long career, McCall’s artwork appeared on US postage stamps, NASA mission patches, the pages of LIFE, the walls of flight centers and museums—including the Smithsonian, and even the advertising poster for Staley Kubrick’s 1968 film 2001: A Space Odyssey.

SITES is honored to include two of McCall’s pieces in the traveling exhibition NASA | ART: 50 Years of Exploration. Jim Dean, founding director of the NASA Art Program and co-curator of the exhibition shared with us his memories of McCall:

"I first met him in 1963 at the Cape. He was part of the first group of artists to get involved with something called the 'NASA Artists Cooperation Program.' The word 'cooperation' was used because we were paying them practically nothing. With success we changed it to 'NASA Art Program" . . . and eventually paid them a little more. I remember Bob, who was living in NY, arrived looking very buttoned down, with a powder blue blazer and wearing a necktie, looking very much the New York illustrator.

That was for Gordon Cooper's Mercury flight. Bob returned to the Cape many times in the following years. I put him on a recovery ship during Gemini, in the Launch Control Center Firing Room during one of the Apollo flights and I went with him and Lamar Dodd on the first Shuttle countdown, before heavy security, when we were able to walk in the flame trench UNDER the shuttle. Years later, when we needed someone for the Space Mural at NASM, I got Bob to do it."

Our sympathies go to McCall’s family and friends. We mourn his loss, but celebrate the man who author Isaac Asimov once described as the “nearest thing to an artist in residence from outer space.”